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Unemployment Rate Increases to 9 Percent

The Labor Department’s monthly jobs report released today shows that unemployment increased from 8.8 percent to 9 percent in April. Back in February 2009, the Obama administration promised that the $819 billion "stimulus" spending package would keep the unemployment rate below 8 percent. The unemployment rate hit double digits in late 2009 and has hovered around 10 percent ever since. The official government unemployment rate does not factor in the nearly one million discouraged workers that have given up searching for a job. Only people who have actively searched for a job in the last few months are counted in the unemployment rate. This means that the actual unemployment could be significantly higher.

The only good news is 244,000 new jobs were created last month. However, the number of people looking for work is increasing at a faster rate than jobs are being created. The Chairman of Obama’s Council of Economic Advisers Austan Goolsbee says that "we are seeing signs that the initiatives put in place by this administration… are creating the conditions for companies to add new jobs.” The opposite is true. Initiatives put in place by the Obama administration such as ObamaCare and the Dodd-Frank financial overhaul law are job killers. The best solution is for the government to get out of the way and let the private sector create jobs.

Speaker of the House John Boehner (R-OH) released a statement today saying that "increasing the national debt limit without significant spending cuts and fundamental budget reforms, as President Obama has proposed, will compound these problems and further hamper job creation in America." He’s right. Congress must act to stop its spending addiction immediately for the sake of economic growth.

We still have a long way to go before we experience true and lasting recovery. One of the best ways to spur job growth is to remove all of the many burdensome regulations on job creators. The United States currently has the highest corporate tax rate in the world. A significant cut to the corporate tax rate will help America stay competitive in the global marketplace. Simultaneously, Congress should promote job growth by making the 2001-2003 tax cuts permanent for all Americans. These steps are crucial to reduce the high 9 percent unemployment rate that we still face.

Are you feeling the recovery yet? You should be, at least according to the president. In his State of the Union address, he said that the economy had “turned the page” and that “the shadow of crisis has passed.” Official government statistics put the unemployment rate at just 5.6 percent, there is no inflation, and GDP growth in the third quarter of 2014 was a booming 5 percent. Never mind that fourth quarter growth was half that, and the economy actually shrank in the first quarter - cherry picking is only bad when other people do it - just keep your eye on the shiny golden 5!

“[T]here's a virtual consensus among economists that the minimum wage is an idea whose time has passed. Raising the minimum wage by a substantial amount would price working poor people out of the job market.”

Early this month, the Pew Research Center released its News IQ Quiz, in order to survey the general public’s level of knowledge about current events. This provided no end of fun for commentators, gleefully mocking the average American’s ignorance, as if knowing the minimum wage or the Chair of the Federal Reserve has any relevance to most people’s lives, when many are still struggling to find jobs and feed their families.

This morning I used Lyft to get to work. My driver conveniently picked me up in a nice, clean, air-conditioned car all the way out in Falls Church, VA (30 minutes away from DC), and he drove me to the Capitol for just $25.

Despite the fact that the vast majority of black voters are Democrats and support President Obama, there’s a growing anti-establishment, anti-Democrat and anti-Obama trend that’s percolating in the black community.

On Friday, May 2, the White House was happy to announce the lowest US unemployment rate since September 2008. As reported by the Bureau of Labor Statistics, with 288,000 nonfarm jobs added to the economy, the unemployment rate dropped from 6.7% to 6.3% in April 2014.

"According to a Gallup poll, economic problems dominate in the question of the most important problem facing the nation today. This makes the priorities championed by Democrats all the more puzzling. "

Economists are now reporting what we all know already - America's economic growth has ground to a halt. Wednesday's report from the Commerce Department was bleak. The expected growth in GDP was 1.1%, but the Commerce Department is now reporting a rate of growth of only 0.1%. This has been felt for a long time by average Americans. According to a Gallup poll, economic problems dominate in the question of the most important problem facing the nation today. This makes the priorities championed by Democrats all the more puzzling. As we struggle to sustain an economic recovery that has been charitably described as "choppy", Democrats continue to push an agenda that is out of touch and fails to solve the underlying problems.

This morning the Bureau of Labor Statistics (BLS), an office within the Department of Labor, announced the unemployment rate for November 2013. As currently calculated, the unemployment rate has indeed fallen to 7.0 percent. The problem is that since the national economy has deteriorated to such a severe degree over the past half-decade the BLS calculations have become a wildly inaccurate way to gauge the health of the broader economy.